The Mailgun alternative
that keeps your logs.
Mailgun's free plan is 100 emails a day and one day of logs; its paid plans start at $15 and keep logs for one to thirty days depending on tier. Sendsprite is a self-hosted email API that sends through Amazon SES in your own AWS account and stores every event in your own Postgres.
Install
curl -fsSL https://sendsprite.com/install.sh | shDocker + Postgres. Prompts for a domain, brings up the container, opens the setup wizard.
01 — Why leave Mailgun
What you give up staying on Mailgun.
Mailgun's email validation, its inbound routing and its dedicated-IP options are solid, and the API has been stable for a decade. If you need validation as a service or a vendor-managed IP pool, it still earns its place.
One day of logs on the plans most people are on
Mailgun keeps one day of logs on Free and Basic, five on Foundation and thirty on Scale. A bounce from last Tuesday is gone by Thursday. Sendsprite keeps every delivery, bounce, complaint, open and click in your database for as long as you choose.
$1.80 per 1,000 against $0.10
Basic is $15 for 10,000 and $1.80 per 1,000 after; Foundation is $35 for 50,000. At SES the same 50,000 cost about $5, and the overage is $0.10.
100 a day is a hard ceiling
Mailgun's free tier stops at 100 emails a day. Self-hosted Sendsprite's limit is your SES quota, which Amazon raises on request.
A modern developer surface
REST with a typed SDK, React email, a CLI for scripts, an MCP server for agents, signed webhooks and a live SSE event stream. Plus the SMTP relay for the things that only speak SMTP.
02 — Side by side
Sendsprite vs Mailgun (Sinch).
| Mailgun | Sendsprite | |
|---|---|---|
| Price at 50,000 emails / month | $35 (Foundation), then $1.30 per 1,000 | $0.10 per 1,000 at Amazon SES — about $5 for 50,000 — plus the box it runs on |
| Free tier | 100 emails / day, 1 day of logs | Free to self-host, for ever. No email cap: the only limit is your SES sending quota |
| Log retention | 1 day (Free, Basic), 5 days (Foundation), 30 days (Scale) | Your Postgres, your retention. Keep events for a day or for ten years |
| Self-hostable | No | Yes — one container plus Postgres, installed with one command |
| Your own AWS account | No — Mailgun's infrastructure | Yes — SES in your account, credentials never leave it |
| Source | Closed | Open source — MIT server, SDK, CLI and MCP server |
| SMTP relay | Yes | Yes — port 587 with an API key as the password |
| Webhooks | Yes | Signed webhooks for delivery, bounce, complaint, open and click, plus a live SSE stream |
| Dedicated IP | $59 per IP per month | Through SES dedicated IPs in your own account |
| AI agents | — | MCP server included, scoped by the same API keys |
Mailgun figures are list prices from www.mailgun.com/pricing/ on 2026-08-29. Amazon SES is $0.10 per 1,000 outbound emails plus $0.12 per GB of attachments.
03 — Questions
Mailgun alternative, asked plainly.
- Is there a free alternative to Mailgun?
- Sendsprite is free to self-host with no email cap of its own. You pay Amazon SES $0.10 per 1,000 emails plus a small server, and you keep your logs for as long as you want.
- How long does Sendsprite keep email logs?
- As long as you like. Events are rows in your Postgres database, so retention is a setting you control rather than a plan tier.
- How do I migrate from Mailgun?
- Install Sendsprite, connect AWS with the one-click CloudFormation stack, verify your domain, then swap the SMTP host or API base URL and key. Webhook payloads are documented for your bounce handlers.
- Does Sendsprite validate email addresses?
- Sendsprite validates syntax on every send and suppresses addresses that hard-bounce or complain. It does not sell a bulk validation API; if you rely on Mailgun's, keep that piece.
04 — Also compared